Scale Independent Thought

Visioning Sustainability

Given a choice between something messy or a beautiful solution, Nature invariably goes for beauty.                                                                

~ Marcus du Sautoy

“Synthetic Gyrus” by Tony DeVarco (dedicated to innovator, inspirator and astronomer Owen Durden)

Today’s world of increasing complexity and rapid globalization leaves us thirsting for new metaphors, analogies and emblems – those that can encapsulate the complex challenges we face into an image of clarity we can wrap our minds around.  As the stakes of our collective behavior rise, this new image must both shock our sensibilities and inspire us into action.  Such a fresh, contemporary archetype must quickly scale visibly into the heart of mass consciousness to encourage humans to become the stewards we were meant to be.  To find these new emblems, we can do what the ancients did before us – look to the dynamic processes, natural morphologies and behaviors of our planet to see how she creates dynamic equilibrium in response to upheaval and change. I suggest a scale free archetypal form for our own age of self-reflexivity – the gyre.

Nothing could be more emblematic of Earth’s own processes of homeostatic stewardship and the grand challenge for humanity to rise to this occasion than two compelling images from the World’s oceans – The powerful brilliance of miles-wide phytoplankton blooms and the infamous spectre of the Texas-sized Pacific Garbage Patch. To juxtapose these two representations of our ocean’s cyclic behaviors gets us to the heart our ecological dilemma.

  

Emiliania Huxleyi Bloom

These two images evoke an understanding of the dynamic power of Gaia at work. One illuminates the powerful force of the ocean gyre in the shapes taken on by coccolithopore blooms that Lynn Margulis, Stephan Harding and others hail as Earth’s most important temperature regulator, a "global air conditioner." The other, a frightening human artifact - where the powerful shape of the gyre is exemplified through a massive, condensed swirl of thoughtlessly discarded plastic.

A gyre is a large-scale swirling vortex in the ocean, caused by the Coriolis effect, the way that moving objects deflect when viewed from a rotating frame of reference.  There are five major natural vortices in Earth’s oceans and numerous small ones formed by the circulation of sea currents that bring water and silt from the lower depths upward and wind currents that move the water back outward from the center.

Yet now the ocean’s natural processes have turned the North Pacific gyre into a dynamic monument to humanity’s excess, a floating wasteland of consumer driven culture – a tightly woven sea of plastic called “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch.” 

To get a sense of just how big this patch of trash is, Greenpeace features an animation of the trash in the Pacific Gyre showing the accumulation over the course of a 6-year period:

  

The Trash Vortex Animation from Greenpeace  

After World Oceans Day in June, Claudia Welss, sustainability leader and founder of the NextNow Collaboratory clarified the current situation with plastic pollution in our oceans and the work of leading scientist Charles Moore who founded the Algalita Marine Research Foundation.  

 

Speaking visually, we have a scale issue with the Pacific Gyre -  we cannot view this garbage patch from Google Earth, or from satellite photos.  We must look at it from up close, in indelible images of plastic trash or animations of its oceanic scope.  Many sites on the web have already mistakenly used a satellite image of an Emiliania bloom to show the garbage patch – the irony is not lost on me, because Emiliania blooms, which we are actually able to see from a satellite view, are here to show us the ocean processes of gyre.  The same dynamics also whip up tons of discarded plastic into a tight mass, like a trash compactor - ready to be recognized, disposed of and used as a cautionary tale about the delicate balance needed in the closed system of Earth. Yet, as part of this cautionary tale, our human created trash patch is choking the life force from our most beloved creatures of the sea. So let's also look a one of these micro sea creatures up close - phytoplankton. 

The Sphere of Stewardship

Emiliania huxleyi is a spherical coccolithaporoid less than 4/1000ths of a millimeter in diameter (4 microns).  As the most abundant phytoplankton in the world’s seas, Emiliana is a major producer of three climate forcing substances: organic carbon, calcium carbonate and dimethyl sulphide (DMS). These coccolithopores close pack together in a swarming mass before they fall to the water’s floor, or rise to its surface. The role of this most prevalent phytoplankton in the world’s oceans is to reflect the sunlight, much like snow in the arctic. Miles-long blooms of Emiliania, sometimes as large as the country of England, swirl with the ocean gyres to form massive, brilliant white “creatures” on the ocean’s surface.

If we look closely at one single specimen of Emiliania, we can see our lovely steward up close.  When viewed from this vantage point, she is a masterwork of gentle geometry, more carefully wrought than the world’s finest lace, whose wheels are bound together through the same fivefold geometry as a geodesic sphere, or the carbon molecule, buckminsterfullerene. 

Emiliania is my favorite microscale archetype – she has been since 1992 when I first found in the archive Bucky’s handwritten note on a microscopic image of emiliania in an early report of the first international program carried out by the paleoclimatic community to assess the climatic state of surface oceans. CLIMAP (Climate: Long-Range Investigation, Mapping and Prediction) was a project funded by NSF and launched in 1976. Fuller's handwritten notes on the report were written shortly before he worked out the final mathematics for his Fly’s Eye Dome in the 1970s. This dome was Fuller’s last experimental geodesic design, where complex curvature inspired by images from the tiniest scale was applied to a modular design of his geodesic enclosures for a home that actually rotated with the sun. Fuller’s Fly’s Eye design was not just inspired by the hexapent morphology of the microscopic eye of a fly, but also from electron microscopic views of our most abundant spherical phytoplankton, Emiliania huxleyi.

Deep in the spherical geometry of each single Emiliania is a nugget, or kernel, of truth – symmetry is a tool of stewardship. The symmetry of the fluid dynamics in the Pacific gyre knits together into a swirling watery mesh almost 4 million tons of our thoughtlessly discarded plastic waste from across over 10 million miles.  There is something amazingly cool about this process. It is the same natural process brings together the Emiliania into blooms on the surface of the sea. But we need our micro and macro lenses for both space and time to see the beautiful power of Emiliania.  To do this we can turn to her namesake, Cesare Emiliani.

  Twentieth century renaissance scientist, Cesare Emiliani was the founder of the discipline of paleoceanography who pioneered the analysis of ancient sediments from the ocean floor as core samples to understand the longer cycles of temperature change on Earth. Emiliani’s work also proved that Earth’s climate cycles are a cosmological problem – demonstrating that we must look at the dynamics of Earth’s orbit in space to better understand our cyclic ice ages. 

 

Diagram of Milankovitch Cycles by D. Tasa, F. Pazzaglia, Tasa Graphic Arts/Lehigh University

Emiliani also proved that Milankovitch cycles of obliquity, eccentricity and precession, when combined, cause major temperature changes leading to dramatic variations in global ice volumes, and this confluence represents the driving force of climate cycles.  Emiliani’s work revolutionized our ideas about the history of the ocean and glaciation and became essential to our greater understanding of paleoclimate. It is indeed fitting that our ancient steward, Emiliania, whose compressed presence can also be seen above ground as the white limestone cliffs of the Seven Sisters of East Sussex and of Dover in England, is the key to understanding climate change and our archetype for planetary stewardship.

Seven Sisters Chalk Cliffs in East Sussex  [CC by Stephen Dawson]

It almost seems that Nature, as a great artist, uses beauty or symmetry as a teaching tool – a way to make us linger and marvel long enough on one scale or another to see the keystones linking everything together. Using this example, photographer and eco-artist Chris Jordan, creates famous scale free montages that draw from the powers of visualization at many scales to make impactful statements on humanity’s excess. As an artist, Chris moves through scale to capture “symmetry” in the chaotic arrangements of crushed cars or in the layout of thousands of Barbie dolls, to shift the way we look at the life cycles and detritus of mass consumerism.

In a new 2009 series titled “Gyre” from his “Running the Numbers II”, Chris draws from one of the most well known Japanese woodblock prints, “Behind the Great Wave of Kanagawa” with a counterpart montage created by 2.4 million pieces of plastic from the Pacific ocean.

In his compelling series of visual musings, Chris makes the image beautiful on one scale, while following with a laser focus the discarded plastic pieces up close. Through these penetrating images, Chris tries to help us visualize “…the social consequences ten thousand miles away of the daily decisions we make as consumers as we try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture.” 

We must assume that Earth is a system, like a spaceship, where everything must be reused, recycled, regenerated. Cautionary tales about this system have been heralded over and over again by grandfathers and grandmothers of the ecology movement, from Rachel Carlson’s 1962 book Silent Spring that looked at the impact of human pollution on bird populations to Buckminster Fuller’s 1970 Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth that offered a blueprint for survival diagnosing the causes of the environmental crisis as a crisis of ignorance. And who can forget James Lovelock’s classic 1979 work, Gaia – A New Look at Life on Earth, that offered for the first time Lovelock and Lynn Margulis' hypothesis that Earth is a self-regulating meta-organism.

 

Very few of us are aware that James Lovelock’s Gaia Hypothesis was almost titled the Gyre Hypothesis. By the time Lovelock’s original book made it in print, he opted for a more mythical, feminine name, “The Gaia Hypothesis” which for better or worse, has also kept at least a generation of scientists at bay because of the title’s quasi-religious connotations. Lovelock’s first book on Gaia has since spawned his series of works with similar titles that carry us through the decades to The Ages of Gaia in 1988,  The Vanishing Face of Gaia in 2007 and The Revenge of Gaia in 2009. Coming back to life, these old classics of early environmentalism arise again with hundreds of new ones with similar messages. They impact our consciousness now, because we are finally beginning to listen … and the title, Gaia now seems even more apropos.

In the past 20 years, these newer mainstream voices led by global Nobel laureate Al Gore and top climate change expert James Hansen take the baton and ground us further in the science behind the message, past the intentional censorship of the Bush administration into the popular press, the international stage and the Internet. They move our understanding forward, finally gaining traction only in the past couple years. 

Yet a new generation of eco-artists such as Chris Jordan bring with their images this deeper understanding into the domain of emotional intelligence. They know that aesthetic perspectives engage synthetic thought, and that we must viscerally “feel” the urgency of the shift that is needed. To elicit this emotional response requires more than simply visualizing the data or articulating the science. Of his own work to raise consciousness of these issues through scale free artworks that include millions of plastic bottles, items of trash or other remnants of humanity’s excess, Jordan notes: “What I am trying to do with my work is to take these numbers, these statistics from the raw language of data and to translate them into a more universal visual language that can be felt… My belief is, If we can feel these issues, if we can feel these things more deeply, then they’ll matter to us more than they do now.”

A tipping point was reached in early 2009 when sustainability burst out of the closet and green thinking finally not only became cool, but started to make good business sense.  Whew!  What a long, winding road to envision humanity’s ecological footprint through time and space, to begin to see the macro paths we have tread en masse over the centuries and now to reflect together on how to go forward – to act. According to the Global Footprint Network, this urgent activism must be swift, deep and global. It must involve every person on Earth.

Global Footprint Network’s World Footprint Projection

In a powerful essay, “Navigating a Sea Change” sustainable design guru, Lauralee Alben uses the profound movements of the oceans as a powerful analogy for personal and organizational transformation. Alben’s definition of gyres as “self-sustaining currents of influence, circular feedback loops that surface innovative solutions and new possibilities” has now propelled practical action into inspired activism within a mainstream business context for almost a decade. Alben Design’s newly launched Sea Change Consortium seeks to help reframe business practice on the personal, community and global level to heed this urgent call. Today the gyre is more than a metaphor, it is a model for sustainable collective action.

The Sea Change Design Consortium  

Toward a Scale Free Systems View of Sustainability

We need to build a new kind of world view… of the interconnection of things – the environmental footprints a thousand miles away of things that we buy... The social consequences ten thousand miles away of the daily decisions we make as consumers as we try to educate ourselves about the enormity of our culture.  Chris Jordan, TED 2009

So, let’s follow this visual story a bit further. In this Summer of 2009, eco footprints, carbon neutrality, sustainable design, and green business are becoming keywords as commonplace as youtube or IPhone. Almost overnight, new visual “systems thinking” models have propagated around the sustainability keyword with spiral views of the balance that must prevail for life on Earth, not just for our own species. On one site alone, Samuel Mann has collected a growing compilation of 179 sustainability visualizations with their links on his blog “Computing for Sustainability.” Samuel’s visual mashup of systems thinking schematics applied to sustainability include venn diagrams, flowcharts, color wheels, pathways and mindmaps. These diagrams have one thing in common – together they represent the first  interdisciplinary compendium of snapshots capturing the systemic nature of the problem, from multiple points of view, from psychology to business practice.

Together, these diagrams create a compelling case for collective stewardship as humanity’s modus operandi.  The kicker is this: Earth will survive as she has done for billions of years.  But unless we shift our point of view, our own species may not. This is not about humanity saving the world.  It is about changing our perception of the world and our place in it. 

New visualizations of Earth and new metaphors, icons and emblems, such as the ubiquitous “universal recycling symbol” first created in 1970 (which could be considered the first public domain symbol generated through design crowdsourcing) now work together to help us rapidly reframe our understanding of Earth toward a systems view and begin to modify our behavior accordingly. 

  Long before the Pacific Gyre, the climate crisis, the Kyoto Protocol and the Copenhagen Climate Council’s emerging Manifesto, Buckminster Fuller, one of the Grandfathers of the ecology movement was calling for a new approach to global stewardship.  His World Design Science Decade plan, first articulated in 1961, proposed that we would find ourselves with only one decade (set to launch 1965-1975) to “turn this ship around” and change our behavior as active stewards of life on Earth.  His modus operandi?  Comprehensive, Anticipatory Design Science. And who would lead the way?  A new generation of architecture students.

Fuller suggested that the solution will not be a top down phenomenon but rather something that must include everyone on Earth – that it was a crisis of ignorance addressed by intentional design spontaneously initiated and propagated by our youngest generations - not a decision to be made by a consortium of political leaders.  This would be an act of inspired, individual initiative - by millions. Now we know it must also be an act of collective, connected, distributed intelligence. And we must connect the dots. Perhaps Fuller’s Design Science approach, originally coined in the 1950s and remaining anonymous for over a half century, could now harness the zeitgeist of sustainable practice – “Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science.” 

With the rise of social media, new global initiatives are rapidly rising to help create and network emergent sustainable design communities of practice who are actively and individually addressing the world’s most pressing problems. One such initiative is the Buckminster Fuller Challenge Prize – a program through the Buckminster Fuller Institute that offers each year a $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a strategy that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge from Buckminster Fuller Institute on Vimeo.

This program has resulted in a growing network of active solutions proposed by entrants who made it through the first two rounds of the Challenge prize. Now entering its third year, the Challenge has aggregated almost 300 proposals in a public “Idea Index” - a fully searchable database of these socially responsible initiatives that can offer each proposal more public support, discussion and interest to build momentum around them. As the Idea Index evolves, it will also leverage and support the internetworking of Design Science solution sets to amplify their effectiveness in the shortest amount of time.

Elizabeth Thompson, BFI's director and co-founder of the Challenge and Idea Index, noted: "The visionary solutions contained in the Idea Index are a demonstration of the intuition shared by many people that the solutions to our most pressing problems are 'out there' - designed by inspired and highly motivated individuals all over the planet. These are people who are not waiting for the mainstream institutions of the world to solve our problems for us!”

The Idea Index includes projects by individuals and groups, some by well known fathers of sustainable practice such as Pliny Fisk or John Todd, as well as those of individuals or small groups of students such as this year’s winning group of MIT students who proposed the “Sustainable Personal Mobility and Mobility-on-Demand Systems.”  Just one of the hundreds of compelling projects to be found in the Idea Index is “The World Game Beta” a project by Katy Barkan, Alessandro Preda, Manuel Mansylla, and Jimena Leiva at the Harvard Graduate school of Design - an idea that concentrates on the importance of visualizing the influence of the Pacific Trash Patch and networking solutions around it.

World Game Beta shows the ocean gyres on Buckminster Fuller's Dymaxion Map

Sustainability is part of a long road back to our collective senses. We are rapidly relearning how to synthesize, syncretize, indeed ecologize our perspectives back to a systems point of view from centuries of over-specialization.  Humanity has spent far too much time dividing up the disciplines, particularly in the sciences, in order to understand the grand sweeping vista of reality, only to discover that we need to find our way back to the indigenous understanding of Earth as living, breathing organism, a systemic whole in a cosmological context, in which humans play an essential, but not indispensable role. 

Ours is a humble task – to simply open our eyes to the systemic qualities of the whole -  perhaps, in so doing, to awaken to Gaia.

~Bonnie DeVarco

The Six Degrees of Connective Intelligence

This Summer solstice weekend, the conversation grids of Twitter and other social media networks brightly light up to align an international community of human revolutionaries - in solidarity with Neda’s compatriots worldwide. 

At this very moment, millions are uniting with their brothers and sisters in the streets of Iran. From thousands of miles away, the Internet brings information immediately between continents and countries as if from the same local community, unencumbered by spatial constraints and political borders.

The hashtags, #IranElection and #Neda become top trending topics on Tweetgrid, linking the Twitter community together to share the latest news minute by minute. Some offer links to the newest updated videos or blog posts, others share Google maps of Embassy locations for the wounded, others, through rapid access to indelible images and video streams, share the immediacy of their heartbreak over the victims - sons and daughters of our international online community.

A borderless community grid of hearts and minds strive for global transparency and share their hopes for freedom with a human country at the crossroads – all in real time. Even our most fleet footed news portals such as CNN and the BBC, denied access to direct information and media feeds, are turning to yesterday’s disruptive social technologies to lend a hand in spreading the word.

And soon, we will have, as we had with President Obama’s inaugural “tweetmap”, new visualizations of this rapid fire ‘global conversation.’ Mapped from data trails of these posts, rendered in seamless, synthetic relief, we will soon have a new dynamic map that puts a vision to this important milestone in the history of the connective mind.  Jeff Clark, also known as Neoformix to visualization buffs, has already provided a word cloud viz to this fleeting territory in his PhraseNet visualization. This one is based on 141,000 characteristic tweets from the Iran election.

This is the beginning of the streaming, conversational network of the realtime global community. Let’s think about it as a small world network.  Most have already heard about the six degrees of separation – how everyone on the planet is connected to everyone else by no more than six degrees. Here is a condensed evolution of small world theory in six steps.

This is the small world network:

1. that was discovered and named by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1967, who postulated that networks of clusters connected to other clusters with very few bridges,

2. Whose connections were popularized by the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon game, “The Oracle of Bacon”

 

3. whose complex systems algorithm was proposed by Watson Strogatz, initiating a new “science of networks” 

 

4. whose collective dynamics were empirically proven by scientist, Duncan Watts (who, with Strogatz, proved exactly how the six degrees model worked in all types of networks).

Watts-Strogatz small-world model generated by igraph and visualized by Cytoscape 2.5. 100 nodes.

5. Whose science of scale-free networks was advanced by physicist Albert-Laszlo Barabasi who proved their distribution follows a specific power law, and this common blueprint can be seen in a vast array of networks – from intra-cellular protein networks to human social networks.

A network biology diagram, depicting a cluster of protein-protein interactions in yeast (Barabasi and Oltvai 2004)

6. whose dynamics were put to practical use through cognitive scientist Alessandro Vespignani’s research, applying network theory of computer viruses to human behavior in order to map how patterns of global transport networks can help us quickly respond to pandemic outbreaks.

 

Impact of Air Travel on the Global Spread of Infectious Diseases, by Vespignani, et.al.

  A brief history of a profound new way of thinking.  Small world theory shows that we are all nodes in a complex network of relationships binding each human being to every other by a maximum of only six degrees.  This proven theory is now a game changer for humanity, rather than a game. The Green revolution of Iran, where the heart of Neda is linked to the hearts of every one of us, is now a human revolution. And its outcome beckons each of us to willingly play our part for a better humanity – and to see how we already make a difference.

With new ways of thinking and “seeing”, we can begin to tell our condensed histories, and to envision new outcomes.  Each and every one of us must understand all too much in all too short a time. The survival of our species depends on it. And visualization technologies that help us do this are our most important tools for shared knowledge and global self-reflexivity.

A surprising initiative to break out of the institutions that hold back this many-to-many communication landscape is emerging from within the institutions themselves. A call and manifesto vastly different than those that came before.

Digital Humanities Seminar in Second Life

As a result of the year long, “Mellon Seminar 2008-09: What is(n’t) Digital Humanities?” at UCLA’s Digital Humanities and Media Studies Lab, a manifesto about the rapidly changing, open source nature of knowledge was developed: The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0. Co-written by Todd Presner of UCLA and Jeffrey Schnapp of Stanford University, this document asks us to listen to what our symbiotic relationship with accelerated communication technologies mirrors back to us about the rapidly changing shape of humanity. Calling itself “an array of convergent practices,” the manifesto is a call to arms, urging us, “Lets get our hands dirty.” Its final paragraph states:

“…our vision is of a world of fusions and frictions, in which the development and deployment of technologies, and the sorts of research questions, demands, and imaginative work that characterize the arts and Humanities merge.”

We must learn to see the relationships between people, knowledge, ideas and activism - and to express and curate them through new technology-mediated art forms. As Twitter streams become maps to new global conversations, fresh perspectives of our collective history are also greatly needed. And many are already available. New maps of science offer us satellite views of humanity’s knowledge based on decades of citations indices. New clickstream maps of knowledge show us how the humanities and social sciences already cross-fertilize each other in ways we never thought were possible.

Places & Spaces: Mapping Science 

New and seasoned multidisciplinary forums for public discourse such as Edge.org and TED talks – all fully available for free - routinely bring our best minds together to synthesize perspectives from culture, art, technology and the sciences. As we work together to create a new “Google Earth” of global knowledge and sensemaking, synthetic minds will be the critical link that enables us to fly seamlessly between satellite views from space and time to local, immediate views from the ground. We are already co-creating a new visual syntax that can display the network effect of knowledge production. We are constructing new cartographies that highlight the complex interrelationships of our global narrative. Met with a new aesthetics of knowledge and human relationship, these tools encourage a more synthetic perspective for the challenges ahead.

The Challenge of Synthesis

“I agree with Nobel Laureate Murray Gell-Mann that the synthesizing mind will be the most valued mind in our century.” Howard Gardner, Five Minds for the Future

As time speeds up for all of us, and knowledge is distributed around us in a flurry of fragments and sound bites, we strive for tools that help us connect and synthesize vastly different pieces of information into a coherent whole. One iconic image from the middle of the 20^th Century comes to mind as I try to wrap my head around the grand challenge of synthesis – one by surrealist artist Salvador Dali. 

Many remember Dali best by the famous melting clocks in his Persistence of Memory; a poster version of this painting was hung in the dorms of more = college students in the past three decades than we could try to count. But a lesser known piece of Dali’s carries with it the confusions and juxtapositions of this new time we are embarking on, without forgetting the face of the past - the Exploding Raphaelesque Head.

The post-WWII style Dali himself deemed “nuclear mysticism,” was best embodied in this fascinating work.  In it, Dali renders the purity and grace of Greek, Roman and Renaissance art and architecture with a masterful hand. He then tears them to shreds to reflect the fresh, post nuclear world of 1951. Releasing the power of the atom bomb in the Vitruvian architecture of the great Roman Pantheon, the perspectivalism and perfect symmetry of Alberti and Leonardo is beautifully torn apart like a bursting balloon.

From the Pantheon’s oculus, luminous rays filter down through the crown of Raphael’s Christian Madonna. Her holy face becomes a locus for swirling particles, each shaped in three dimensions like dozens of horns from Albrecht Durer’s Rhinosceros – the iconic woodcut of 1515. Dali captures the modern world’s scientific vista by making subatomic matter newly visible. Yet now each is “spiritualized” in the spiral symmetry of every fragment. In the same way that the art of Leonardo and Durer brought forth a new approach to rendering three dimensions onto a 2 dimensional plane, five centuries ago, Dali’s artwork moves us from 3D to 4D, shattering our spatial conventions through the element of time and the juxtaposition of the atomic and human scale.  Without moving away from the Renaissance masters, Dali copies and envelops them instead, offering the viewer a series of nested compositions. These convergent sensibilities fully reflect Renaissance religious conventions and the scientific reality of the mid 20^th century at the very same time.

In today’s accelerated, mashable, emergent Web 3.0, in the conversational networks driven by a new generation of social media, reality has taken us to a similar place.  Now, like Dali’s patterned nuclear fragments in a symmetrical landscape, networked knowledge can be seen and understood in aggregated form through high resolution views of patterned data. Knowledge is color coded and particulate, swarming like schools of fish or flocks of birds into recognizable flows and related clusters. 

To read this new “language”, our minds must be flexible or, as curator Paola Antonelli suggests, “elastic.” We must adopt one of the five new “minds of the 21^st century” suggested by Howard Gardner – the synthesizing mind - as a lens in which to read these new pictures of knowledge and to discover the wisdom within. 

Clickstream Map of Science, Bollen, et.al.

This is what maps of knowledge look like today – the colorful image above shows us a new vista of meaningful connections existing between the humanities and the sciences. Johan Bollen, a researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico demonstrates the co-evolution and shared influence between disciplines in a new map based on Clickstream data. This map, based on a billion user interactions recorded by scholarly web portals, brings to life the collective knowledge flows between disciplines. The color coded nodes show clusters of relationships between information seekers, academic publishers and university consortia, gleaned from mapping access and usage patterns as readers click through journal articles on the Internet. Bollen and his associates’ visualization  represents a new generation of dynamic mapmakers taking science mapping one step closer to representing the influence of academic papers on a broad range of knowledge workers in addition to academics who publish and cite each others’ work. 

Manuel Lima, information architect whose Visual Complexity site has long been one of the premiere aggregators of visualization methods offers an important diagram for visualizing meaningful information:

And describes its power here:

Manuel Lima interview May 2009

In conclusion, the visual meditation I wrote above is based on what I would like to call the “Six Degrees of Connective Intelligence”:

1. Human stories become real time conversations documented on the social web
2. that link humans into complex conversational and activist networks
3. that leave information trails and data tracks we can turn into maps, artworks and visualizations
4. that we can draw from to synthesize new information
5. to tell ourselves richer, more comprehensive narratives and stories
6. to gain and share a higher level of collective wisdom

Synthetic Mind by Tony DeVarco

Salvador Dali juxtaposed the Renaissance symmetry with the atomic age of fragmentation, yet it was the synthetic mind of the artist that made this image resonate.  Now as we open our eyes to this new landscape of connectivity, complex systems, network science and the self reflexive global mind, as we tell our histories en masse and in unison, we too, will find richer, more beautiful ways to envision this truth.  ~ Bonnie DeVarco

Envisioning Guinea Pig “B”

Before e-mail, blogging and IM, before Mind Mapping, Lifestreaming and MyLifeBits, before Web 2.0, InfoVis, Wikis, Flickr, Twitter and Twine, the “world’s friendly genius” was creating and documenting his life and the life of those around him in a way millions of people are just beginning to do today. Buckminster Fuller is, simply put, the most well documented human of the 20^th century

Life, Facts & Artifacts Word Cloud created in Wordle

In 1927 Fuller embarked upon a lifetime experiment as Guinea Pig “B”.  He would document his life in a most comprehensive manner in order to demonstrate and articulate what “one man could do on behalf of all humanity.” Thinking this experiment would last only about a decade, he actually lived much longer– finally leaving our planet just days short of 88 years. Now Bucky’s 56-years of self documentation is unparalleled in history - his collection was deemed by the Smithsonian in 1985 the “most extensive personal archive” and one of the most unique collections in existence. 

The fully documented life of any individual might be interesting to some - witness the rapid proliferation of personal blogs in cyberspace today. Yet Buckminster Fuller’s life was far from ordinary. He embarked on his experiment at a unique time in our history – a time of rapid industrialization, the birth of modernism and what Fuller himself called the transition from “a Newtonian to Einsteinian world.” He also played a role in the most interesting cultural intersections of American innovation, influencing the frontiers of vintage futurism, the emergent union of Nature and the arts, the illuminated shadows of transclassical architecture, the uncharted scientific territory of nanoscale design and the emergent future of communications technology. 

A glimpse of Bucky's social network in - what else? - a buckyball!

Known to his friends (who included everyone he knew and met) as “Bucky”, he was a dense node in a powerful network of leading edge thinkers every decade of his enormously prolific life. He was also an innovator, Renaissance man and one of the most notable figures of the 20th century. He utilized all forms of media available to him to document his life: wire recordings, audio & video tape, letters, transcripts, photos, slides, manuscripts, books, articles, clippings and a broad range of ephemera. As an inveterate writer, lecturer, world traveler, architect, mathematician and inventor, Fuller left thousands of articles, 28 published books, 25 U.S. patents, hundreds of architectural artifacts and models embodying the “universal principles” he discovered. 

Although he dropped out of Harvard twice, by 1983 Fuller taught at over 150 universities, received 47 honorary doctorates and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Yet perhaps only in the invisible architecture of information in the materials Bucky compiled during his lifetime experiment as Guinea Pig “B” can his methodology of planetary problem solving and scale independent thought be truly understood. Looking closely at his work and the extraordinary collection housed at Stanford University, there will be no doubt that Buckminster Fuller was the prototypical Planetary Citizen and a model for the mobile, connected human and global problem solver of today. 

If we could visualize the sweeping arcs and angles of this archival artifact - the collection of Guinea Pig “B” - we would see a beautiful series of intersecting patterns. We might even begin to hear a musical cadence, the sweeping symphony of the evolution of his thoughts and ideas. Fuller himself would have called this the frequency modulations of his partially overlapping scenario Universe. This is a vision worth exploring.

Crowdsourcing Communitas

New Vistas of the Community Self

“We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important choices wisely."  E.O. Wilson, Consilience

Aggregation, Integration, Synthesis. These are the goals of tomorrow’s knowledge workers. Yet these are already the salient characteristics of today’s flowing data visualizations.

A clip from the BBC’s 2008 “Britain from Above” captures GPS Traces of planes in British air spaces and second-by-second tracks of British chatter.

  Here we are, on the other side of Moore’s Law, our sophisticated technologies moving briskly up the now vertical arc to what Ray Kurzweil termed “The Singularity” - a time when technological change is so fast that our tools outstrip our ability to control them, when machines become more intelligent than humans. On our way up this curve, we also confront ourselves with another new phenomenon as our many-to-many global communication and sensing tools send images back to us from abstract space.

  We can now speed up time to visualize the dynamic aggregations of collective thought, the strange attractors of knowledge, the pulsing nodes of communication and the buzzing, self-assembly of networked human activity. These patterns invoke shades of what Stephen Jay Gould described as the “punctuated equilibrium” of evolutionary behavior and reflect what Buckminster Fuller called the “partially overlapping scenario Universe.” This new genre of dynamic, illuminated visions have come alive with full-blown intensity before our collective eyes. These visions are at once disarming, evocative, enlightening.

 Media artist, designer and researcher Aaron Koblin’s animation of flight paths across America - 2008

These fresh, dynamic vistas are bathed in patterned symmetry - a complex geometric confluence of color and light. Whether we look at the dance of orbs called “Universe - 6 Billion Humans, 6 Billion Colors” on the screen of our Nokia cell phones in the morning, or view the neon webworks of Britain’s flight paths over time on a larger screen, we can see the rapid pulse of planetary activity caught as never before. Similar to the first Blue Marble image of Earth from Space, these new visions of group movement in timespace unite broad swaths of the mobile connected human - the many - into a unified, multifarious identity - a groupmind. We are less the Singularity than The Multiplicity. 

Nokia E71 launch / 6 Billion People, 6 Billion Colours from Universal Everything on Vimeo.

  Like Kevin Kelly’s “One Machine” or OM, we have together found a converging technological palette that allows us to tell our story to ourselves through a new medium. And it looks beautiful. Artists, musicians poets, architects have long shaped the story of humanity in their sculptures, poetry, their paintings, songs and buildings.  A new generation of aesthetic programmers, designers and Information architects now take the helm as the synthesizers, capturing streams of collective emotional intelligence, wrapping them with color and shape, in silky tendrils of light, letting them speak a new language – whispering visually the subtext of our species. 

A new poetics of technology is born.  Poetry, having always emerged in the space between chisel and stone, hand and brush, thought and pen, emerges once again, yet now between mind and code. Beautiful data. With the fusion of humans and their tools, the science of design and data mining reach a new milestone to become a new mirror of communitas. Design scientists, data artists, programmers such as Aaron Koblin, Chris Harrison, Jonathan Harris, Moritz Stefaner, Sep Kamvar, Jonathan Harris, Martin Wattenberg, Fernanda Viegas and Jeffrey Heer bring a fresh new face to collaborative data design and information aesthetics, the new language of connectivity.  As mesmerizing as they are informative, their technological artworks render compelling the patterns of activity, capturing the mobility of thought.

  What is both the driving force and the eventual result of these emergent visual mediums?  Crowdsourcing, actionable knowledge and connective, distributed intelligence. I suggest the following formula:

Data is the key

Disciplined, strategic crowdsourcing is the methodology

Visualization is the language

Who is using this formula successfully?  Some of our most seasoned media groups such as the New York Times, Time/Life, Wired and SEED Magazine. Who are the people to watch?  They are young, fiercely aesthetic computer scientists and designers, often new professors in our best universities or graduate students immediately brought into the creative centers of Google, Microsoft, IBM and other industry leaders.   Yet many of their technologies emerge as open source tools and are used and developed further by thousands of other programmer artists.  Most of their images and videos immediately become viral.  And often their projects, such as Aaron Koblin and Takahashi Kawashima’s Ten Thousand Cents,  whose proceeds went to the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) initiative, offer financial benefits to decrease the digital divide. This is why their work is so important – these projects both sow the seeds for and demonstrate the benefits of crowdsourcing.

Ten Thousand Cents from Ten Thousand Cents on Vimeo.

  CROWDSOURCING – In circulation for less than a few years, this broadly accepted meme will bring well over a million hits on a Google search.  The neologism itself was coined by Steve Jurvetson in his one sentence entry on a public forum in one of the most robust of Web 2.0’s visual crowdsourcing tools, Flickr. A new meme was born.  Crowd sourcing means community-based design or participatory, distributed design.  Essentially it is the application of open source principles to things other than software – such as content or design. 

There were many examples of crowdsourcing before there was even a term for them – the most well known example might be the SETI@Home Project  that put out an open call for people to use spare processing power on their home computers. Through the distribution of free screensavers, the SETI Project attracted over three million users to help them search for extraterrestrial intelligence in space.

Wikipedia, WikiMapia and MediaWiki, Gigapan, Youtube and Flickr base their growth of content on the principle of crowdsourcing. Google has applied it often to help develop, enhance and scale their applications such as Google Earth. In the best sense of the word, crowdsourcing is the application of a phenomenon described by James Surowiecki as the “wisdom of crowds” and by Howard Rheingold as SmartMobs in his 2002 book by the same name.

Journalist Jeff Howe first identified crowdsourcing in his June 2006 article in WIRED. By early 2008 he wrote and published the first book on it and crowdsourced the cover art.  Crowdsourcing has been criticized by some, called “digital sharecropping” or demoted as an applied way to amplify mediocrity. But it has also been seen as a direct outgrowth of collaborative Web 2.0 technologies and lauded by popular technorati blogs such as ReadWriteWeb where it is described as “a million heads are better than one.” Many new projects are catching the wave of applied crowdsourcing.

By late 2008 numerous crowdsourcing projects and portals had been launched, some already very successful, including 99 Designs to revolutionize branding, Threadless, a T-shirt design hub for the masses and the Intel/ASUS project WebPC  whose aim is to crowdsource the community design of the dream PC. Even President Barak Obama’s campaign drew much of its power from the judicious and creative crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing was a common way to homestead virtual worlds in the late 1990s. When the ActiveWorlds virtual universe launched, they opened up to widespread building of 3D content by hundreds of users. The results were easy to see in the first satellite maps of AW over the first three years of its use:

Roland Vilett generated three satellite maps of AciveWorlds between 1996 and 1999

Here we see the same phenomenon happening in the real world as colorful meridians of the planet light up in one year of edits in OpenStreetMap. The OSM mapper was created by ITO, a UK-based company founded by Peter Miller and Hal Bertram. It is the largest open source map of the entire world – completely developed by crowdsourcing!  It began in 2004, and by 2008 four times as many people were adding to it daily, autogenerating maps with GPS, adding satellite photos or out of copyright maps for every locale on the planet. Miller created a video showing the year of edits occurring in 2008 clearly showing in dynamic relief, the power and value of tools that harness distributed Intelligence, the “wisdom of crowds.”

OSM 2008: A Year of Edits from ItoWorld on Vimeo.

  It is already becoming clear that the new semantic social networks based around knowledge sharing (such as Twine) will leverage the power of intelligent crowdsourcing to a degree we have not yet seen. Although it allows only 140 character entries, one could easily call the microblogging tool, Twitter with its endless spinoff of applications around the API, the perfect crowdsourcing phenomenon. TwitterMosaic is a Twitterer who asks for people to follow him so he can regularly create mosaics with their snapshots using an open source tool.  By July 6, 2008, he had mosaic’d the famous 1972 Blue Marble image of Earth with 1325 followers.  At the time of this writing, he has 3259 followers.

 

FACES of EARTH - 1972 NASA Blue Marble image of Earth as a Twitter Mosaic.

 Crowdsourcing as a Beneficial Tool for Change

"If success or failure of the planet and of human beings depended on how I am and what I do ...
How would I be? What would I do?"     R. Buckminster Fuller

To be a sustainable and benevolent force, the most ideal application of crowdsourcing works as a strategic and disciplined long-term strategy that benefits everyone involved.  It should bring out the best in crowds by enhancing and supporting their individual and shared creativity. Visualization technologies allow us to take a peak at crowdsourcing phenomena, offering us a way to view its power and scope. 

  This profusion of crowdsourced activities using visualization technologies hit a tipping point with the inauguration of President Barak Obama in January, 2009.  These visualizations showed the power of such open source tools, content and conversations, and embody the spirit of communitas in our own country and around the world. Some examples below show how they have helped us vision the sweep of a new zeitgeist. 

  A project of Flowing Data in January captured the flow of people’s positive comments around the world in realtime during the day of the inauguration.

 

Screenshot of Flowing Data’s timelapse animation  shows worldwide Twitter positive comments on the Inauguration.

GeoEye’s high resolution satellite image of the inauguration gives us pause as we take in the power of crowds from a half meter above the capital.

The amazing 3D photo mapping tool, Photosynth wraps photos taken by a diversity of producers together into a seamless mosaic. Layers of points of view are unified with aesthetic concision and the new image can be navigated from any point of view.  Yet tools like this also beg the question, who owns what?  We all own the final creation and can access its constituent parts. Photosynth is shown off in the video below with 613 photos taken during the inauguration on January 20, 2009.

A screencast showing Barack Obama’s inauguration on January 20th 2009 in Photosynth

The emergent status of copyright and copyleft crowdsourced visualizations has begun to push us into new territory that helps to redefine and extend our notions of fair use.  With mashups driving the rapid creation of new forms of crowdsourced media, we will soon see the next iteration of Creative Commons’ efforts to support a global participatory culture of media sharing.  Take the famous HOPE poster of Barak Obama as a case in point. When outsider artist Shepard Fairey created what is now called by its crowdsourced name, the “Hope Obamacon” during the primaries, he based it on an image of Obama taken by photographer Mannie Garcia and owned by the AP. At the time, Fairey didn’t even know who took the photo. But crowdsourcing created the demand for his powerful image during the year that followed and it became so popular that Obama’s campaign adopted it as the iconic image for the inauguration.  Soon after, the AP, who owned Mannie’s photo took out a lawsuit against Fairey.

 

Now Larry Lessig, the law Professor who put a legal lens on the age of hybrid media by founding the Fair Use Project at Stanford University is crowdsourcing a resolution to the “fair use case” by representing Fairey and opening up his blog to public discourse and input on the source images.  The most interesting side note of this entire affair is that neither Fairey nor Garcia received income from this now famous artwork.

Why is this important?  Because within a few years, perhaps even a few months (in a Moore’s Law timescale) of this writing, we will see the next wave of the power of crowdsourcing. What these visualizations of one of the watershed moments in America’s history portend for the global future is important.  With the rapid, distributed creation and sharing of media, we are becoming a self-reflexive human superorganism with the ability to look at who we are en masse.  At first glance that statement may seam like hyperbole. But let’s look closer at the mainstream context of visualization and crowdsourcing.

On October 27, 2008, the New York Times opened their online public visualization lab partnering with the IBM’s ManyEyes  visualization toolset. They now encourage their readers to discover and share their own visual representations of trends using the latest research and statistics on popular issues such as the global economy, city-based SAT performance or the presidential election results. Visualizations are added to an open archive with a comment function for each, becoming catalysts for further discussion and connective intelligence.

In January 2008, the Library of Congress decided to crowdsource undescribed photos from their archives. Publishing 3,115 vintage photos to Flickr, LOC appealed the Flickr social network for crowdsourced tagging of the photos.  In November of 2008, Life Magazine in collaboration with Google released high resolution scans of 20 percent of their archive of 10 million mostly unpublished photos. These photos date back to the 1750s. With very little detailed annotations, crowdsourcing will be the phenomenon that brings a more detailed context to each photo.

On March 5, 2009 Barak Obama appointed his new Federal Chief Information Officer, Vivek Kundra. Kundra's work with crowdsourced data visualization tools (such as those from Tableau Software and Google Earth) for crime and disaster response was recognized during his earlier role as the CTO on Mayor Adrien Fenty's cabinet  for the District of Washington D.C.  In November 2008 Kundra had said: “When I first came on board as a Chief Technology Officer, I walked out of my place, went to the local coffee shop and I discovered sitting in that coffee shop that I had more computing power than the average police officer in the District of Columbia, the average teacher and the average person who was issuing tickets.” His emphasis is on amplifying the effective use of publicly available visualization tools to help the government serve the public's needs - now he will no doubt be doing this on a national scale.

SEED, a magazine that captures the zeitgeist as no other does, is now launching a visualization arm - the SEED Visualization Unit. They have hired one of the pioneer information aestheticians, MIT’s Ben Fry as its Design Director. They will partner with SEED’s research arm Phyllotaxis Lab, (their now famous Phylotaxis visualization was created by Jonathan Harris) as well as academic institutions around the world to provide education in the field of data visualization.

The few examples above begin to point to exemplars who use this formula:

Data is the key

Disciplined, strategic crowdsourcing is the methodology

Visualization is the language

  Here is why the formula works. Often some of our greatest ideas and their original contexts get lost, or vastly modified on their way up in the companies and institutions, the hierarchies and bureaucracies, creating barriers of access to genius between brainchild and figurehead. Now in the age of timecoded public conversations on microblogs and lifelogs, many-to-many direct feeds are taking place in a new “Agora” of public discourse. A new type of distributed genius is being picked up. We have entered the age of Collective, Connective, Distributed Intelligence.  Crowdsourcing is a modus oprandi for the brilliant generativity of our emergent digital commons.

When the shared creativity of the human spirit is unleashed and sees its reflection at the same time, we are offered a new vision of the collective self, of communitas in action. As we send back these crowdsourced images to the community self, we can begin to SEE the organism. We can make out its shimmering presence, and it is beginning to speak back to us.

*******

Aesthetics of the Connective Mind

“Nothing fundamental separates the course of human history from the course of physical history, whether in the stars or organic diversity. Astronomy, geology, and evolutionary biology are examples of primarily historical disciplines linked by consilience to the rest of the natural sciences." E.O. Wilson, Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge

            For some time, we have been witnessing what Buckminster Fuller called “accelerating acceleration.” Whether we admit it or not, each and every one of us feels this evolutionary shift in the speed of change – it’s palpable. We are becoming comfortable with history in motion, where we tell our generational stories without losing their dynamism, where we wrap our hands and heads around the union of the microcosm of mind and the macrocosm of the known Universe. We are rapidly developing new communication tools to express it and new arts to envision it.

Visualizing the Bible  -  Chris Harrison and Christoph Römhild collaborated to create this beautiful image above. It is agreed by many to be one of the most poetic data visualizations ever created. The rainbow colored arcs illuminate the 63,779 cross references found within the Bible. 

            The rapid proliferation of new communication tools and information have split our attention, scattered our minds and fragmented our thinking processes. Yet at the very same time we are creating new visual languages to express these massive amounts of data and to envision our human communication patterns. We map the cross-fertilization of ideas and aggregated communities of action and purpose. We visualize the fusion of social networks, the elastic unity of the creative urge, the emergence of new fields, disciplines and paradigms.  And as these maps and visualizations converge, we recognize a more overarching shape, a combined presence that can only be felt and seen, but not described. 

            We need to move to a new "pattern language" to find a unifying vision for the profusion of media and information that confronts us every day. We need to understand patterns of data from a broader point of view and continuously visualize how we fit into the image of the whole. We are part of a mosaic that cannot be accessed linearly or in pieces.  But we do recognize it when we see it.

Twingly Screensaver - Visualizing the Blogosphere 

            What are the essential characteristics of this recognizable mosaic, this complex, convergent image of the whole? In a return to very ancient ideas, four words may come together to describe it – integritas, consonantia, claritas and communitas. In the 13^th century, theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas deemed the first three Latin terms the essential qualities of beauty in his Summa Theologiae. To these three terms I will add another Latin term, communitas, which was rescued in the 1980s in the anthropological study of the ritual process.  Together these four terms below capture an understanding of visualization that offer an exquisite way to think about today's mirrors of connective intelligence.

            Integritas is translated as “wholeness” or “completeness” - the realization of perfection. According to Umberto Eco, integritas means “the presence in an organic whole of all the parts which concur in defining it as that which it is.” The word integritas captures the essential soul of the thing, the moment when it transcends mere representation. Buckminster Fuller popularized a scientific word for the intentional application of integritas – synergy – where the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Now this word is used to characterize everything from group cooperation in corporate environments to Toyota’s hybrid technology – “Synergy Drive.”

            Consonantia is pragmatically applied in the most ancient principle of architecture – the “divine proportion.” Intentionally used by architects, stone masons, artists, musicians and designers for centuries, consonatia means proportion and harmony – where the parts come together in a unified way and each part mirrors and reflects the whole.

            Claritas, “radiance” or “spendor” is the unique and present essence of the thing itself. It is both the pleasure and truth of each aspect and the universal qualities in the whole – its brilliance and luminosity. Claritas is the quality that allows beauty to illuminate its beholder, where intellect and intuition converge in its encounter.

            Communitas is the spirit of community. Cultural anthropologist Victor Turner borrowed the Latin word, communitas to describe an essential element of the ritual experience - the communal nature of shared liminality. When individuals are liminal, they are ambiguous, in transition. When a group of individuals share an ephemeral identity during rites of passage, communitas is often experienced. According to Turner, communitas is marked by the sacred – a feeling of togetherness that is closer than that allowed under normal conditions. Sometimes called “unity consciousness,” communitas is a transient state – it does not last - yet participants are transformed in some way by their experience of it.

            As our collective perception is reshaped by the dynamic reflection of the whole, these four terms merge into a new way of telling the history of beauty and describing modern aesthetics of connective intelligence. Where Goethe called architecture “frozen music” our new information architectures today are nothing if not fluid. 

Information aesthetics elevates our understanding of the organism while at the same time bringing the laboriously abstract considerations of aesthetics down to manageable size. We “get” these pictures. They speak to us viscerally, they beguile us, they are attractive.  They speak across scale, geography, culture, class and point of view; They unify our understanding by personalizing it, by helping us see where each and every one of us fits into the whole.  They have integritas. And, like the first Earthrise image, they engender communitas, mirroring the unity of the organism as they enhance our collective vision, our connective mind, through the act of looking. 

These old Latin terms from the history of aesthetics have a new ring when we speak in the language of pattern about the emerging global mind. This new art form for connective intelligence reflects the aggregated patterns of humanity, the dance of communication and the circuits of shared knowledge in ways that ignite our intuition and stir our emotions. 

We have emergent memes and new portals as creative design and aesthetics meets information visualization. Andrew Vande Moere at the University of Sydney’s Information Aesthetics weblog, exploring the “symbiotic relationship between creative design and the field of information visualization,” is one of them. Infosthetics is one of a new generation of pointers to something larger, something that is shifting from infancy to its next stage – a generative mosaic of connective intelligence. As economic systems collapse around the world, a new sense of the collective self is rising through this global brain trust. And in 2009, SIGGRAPH Conference is encouraging this shift by developing a new thematic area for Information Aesthetics, the “Information Aesthetics Showcase.”  Vande Moere just posted an interview with the curator of this showcase, Victoria Szabo on his blog here. 

In the next few entries I will highlight some of today’s dynamic visualizations that best embody these essential qualities of beauty: Integritas, Claritas,Consonantia and Communitas.